58 THE ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS. 
greater part of their families, and encamped for sev- 
eral days at this immense nursery. Severalof them 
informed me that the noise in the woods was so 
great as to terrify their horses, and that, in speaking, 
it was difficult for one person to make another hear 
without bawling inhisear. The ground was strewed 
with broken limbs of trees, eggs, and young pigeons, 
which had been precipitated from above, and on 
which herds of hogs were fattening. Hawks, buz- 
zards, aid eagles were sailing about in great num- 
bers, and seizing the young from their nest at pleas- 
ure; while, from twenty feet upward to the tops 
of the trees, the view through the woods presented 
a perpetual tumult of crowding and fluttering multi- 
tudes of pigeons, their wings roaring like thunder, 
mingled with the frequent crash of falling timber; 
for now the axemen were at work cutting down 
those trees that seemed to be most crowded with 
nests, and contrived to fell them in such a manner 
that in their descent they might bring down several 
others; by which means the falling of one large 
tree sometimes produced two hundred young, little 
inferior in size to the old ones, and almost one mass 
of fat. Onsome single tree upward of one hundred 
nests were found, each containing a single young 
one only, a circumstance in the history of this bird 
not generaily known to naturalists. It was danger- 
ous to walk under these flying and fluttering mil- 
lions, from the frequent fall of large branches, broken 
down by the weight of the multitudes above, and 
which, in their descent, often destroyed numbers of 
the birds themselves, 
“These circumstances were related to me by 
many of the most respectable part of the community 
in that quarter ; and were confirmed in part by what 
I myself witnessed. I passed for several miles 
through this same breeding-place, where every tree 
was spotted with nests, the remains of those above 
described. In many instances I counted upward of 
